These color photographs of Budapest, Hungary were taken in the summer of 1939. World War II was weeks away from beginning. The streets, bridges, and riverbanks captured here would soon belong to a country at war — but in these images, none of that is visible yet.
Budapest in 1939 was a grand European capital. The city straddled the Danube River, with Buda on the hilly western bank and Pest spread across the flat eastern side. Its architecture, boulevards, and bridges reflected decades of prosperity and ambition.
Hungary at this time was governed by Miklós Horthy, who had ruled the country since 1920. Horthy was a committed anti-Semite. Under his leadership, laws were passed that banned Jewish people from working in government, stripped them of voting rights, and barred them from marrying non-Jews. Roma people were also persecuted and enslaved during this period.
On November 20, 1940, Hungary formally joined the Axis powers by signing the Tripartite Pact, aligning itself with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Less than a year later, Hungarian forces took part in the German-led invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941.
The Danube, which winds through the heart of the city, appears in many of these photos as a calm, scenic backdrop. But the river became the site of one of the war’s most brutal atrocities. Between December 1944 and January 1945, members of Hungary’s Arrow Cross Party forced as many as 20,000 Jewish people to the riverbank.
Victims were ordered to remove their shoes, beaten, and shot into the river. Today, 60 pairs of iron shoes are fixed to the bank of the Danube as a memorial to those killed there. The shoes represent what was taken from each victim in their final moments.
Horthy remained in power until 1944, when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary directly and he was removed from office. By then, the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz was already underway. More than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported in just two months during the summer of 1944.
Looking at these summer 1939 photographs, the city appears untouched by any of what was to come. People go about their days on sunlit streets. The colors are vivid and the scenes are ordinary — markets, bridges, buildings, the river.
That ordinariness is part of what makes these photos so striking. This is Budapest just months before Hungary’s government steered the country into one of history’s deadliest conflicts — and before its own citizens carried out mass killings on the banks of the river seen in these very images.
